Reassembling Religion: Sino-Tibetan Encounters in Serta

Abstract

This dissertation examines a Buddhist revitalization movement in the Tibetan county of Serta, in Sichuan Province in the PRC. It explores this revitalization movement as reassembled from associations of humans and nonhumans. Serta’s religious landscape was torn apart in the chaotic Maoist era. Revival in this context was precisely an act of reassembly. This research shows that the revitalization process consisted of numerous occasions in which humans, texts, landscapes, and material objects all made a difference, occasions that extended this revitalization movement into Han Chinese cities. This study is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on assemblage in anthropology, to cross-disciplinary studies of religious revival, and to anthropology of religion where issues of situating religion in materiality, relationships, and encounters have been the central focus of inquiry.

More specifically in this dissertation, I explain a series of Sino-Tibetan encounters in Serta over the second half of the twentieth century. In 1952, Chinese work teams took over the region. Upon their arrival, work team cadres made great efforts to document Serta. Archival records of the time give evidence to the dramatic effects of Chinese policies on the traditional system of Serta, especially on its monastic groups. This early encounter calls attention to prophetic texts that prevailed in Serta. For at least one century, Serta had been envisioned as a mandala prone to the attack of demons. In this area, large numbers of prophecies described that when demon armies invaded Serta, wrathful gods would appear to tame the demons. Interpreting the “demon armies” as the Chinese troops, monks and nomads in Serta launched an armed resistance for taming. In the revival period of the 1980s, a new charismatic lama, Jigme Phuntsok, again deployed prophecies, this time to reassemble religion in networks of humans and nonhumans. By creatively interpreting prophecies, Jigme Phuntsok identified new religious sites, retrieved treasures, sanctified the teachings he revealed as transmitted from old saints, and constructed himself as a bodhisattva prophesied to emerge when demons are rampant. In 1987, encouraged by a few prophecies, Jigme Phuntsok began to spread Buddhism in China, still as an effort to tame demons, but through the dharma rather than weapons. In the following decades, a Buddhist network that articulated Tibetan monks and urban Chinese groups emerged from Serta. This network involved massive flows of donations, pilgrims, and Buddhist works, and it brought enormous changes to the relationship of religion and politics in this region.

This project touches upon Buddhist philosophy as it explores those traditions that feature prophecies. Due to Buddhist doctrine, what violence, history, temporality, text, language, landscape, materiality, ethics, and human beings mean to monks are different from the conventional notions of the words. Thus this study of religion is a broad account of these themes in the ontological turn of anthropology. In this dissertation, I further investigate how Buddhist views intersect with the views of other groups, such as Tibetan nomads, Chinese officials, and Chinese laypeople.